Riley’s Blog

There hasn’t been any big announcement yet on Faintmedia but we do have another project idea in mind currently called Venom. Venom is a CMS (Content management system) for the more advanced web designer. It will give you full access to your sites HTML allowing you to change each page.

The Layout Setup
We are currently in the planning stages of Venom right now but one of the things I have planned is a layout system which would work like so:

Say I wanted a generic header for each of my pages. So I make a page with all the information that would be the same in it. I would check a box that says that its just a layout file so that you can’t view that page from the browser itself. Now I would go into the pages that use that header and add some sort of template tag such as:

{layout.HEADER}

HEADER would be the name of the file. So now when I want to change something in the header it would change it on all the pages that have that tag at the top.

There will also be other variables you may use such as the title tag {general.TITLE} or something like that which would allow you to display the title of the page you are on in your header file.

Customize
I have big plans for the customization. If you are someone that enjoys modding scripts this will be easy for you. The backend will run off of XML files that will allow you to create what the button link for your mod says in the admin panel and what the side menu’s options are. It will also tell which PHP files are used for each page. So once you have the XML file setup you just need to code the PHP file’s that will run inside Venom and then it will display all that information when your in that area.

For example: Say I want a store running through PayPal but I don’t want to have a page for every product and I don’t want to do all the PHP in the layout file itself. You could create a customization. So you would have a new button in the admin panel that allows you to set everything up and that will save to the database. You will have a PHP file that tells how it should be displayed and what the variable is that is used to display it. So you would do everything in that part of the script and the only thing that will be in your actual store file would be something like {plugin.STORE} and that would display what you set it to.

I’m sorry for jumping all around with that description but I’m just trying to get out what I’m thinking about this part of the script. I will get a more detailed description out later on when we have started development. I think this feature will have lots of potential because you don’t need to use it for a store. You could use it for a blog or other things like that.

That’s all for now. I just thought I would give you a taste of what’s cooking on our labs.

PictureMe is being Beta tested right now. We are looking for all the bugs that need to be fixed. At the moment everything is looking pretty good. I’ve added a few more features to the script that should hopefully make it more secure.

Future Features
I have a few ideas already about what I want to added to the script. I plan to add the ability to put videos on there and buy now buttons for people that want to sell their work.

Code Revamp!?
It will be a pain but worth it. Since I’ve created the Broken Framework I want to redo the script so that it uses the framework’s library of functions.  I want to do this for a few reasons. First it will be less cluttered. Second it will allow me to use the different features that framework has. Thirdly I will be able to work on some of the parts of the code that I think need it. This won’t happen for a while I’m just thinking ahead to what will need to be done.

Whats Left?
Well we need to finish beta testing the script. I still want to do some changes to the default skin to make it look nicer. That’s really all that needs to be done to the script itself. Then I need to figure out the price of the script, create the PayPal page and make it so that once I approve the PayPal submission you will be able to download it.

I’m planning to build a plugin that allows the admin to add social bookmarking site buttons to the bottom of their posts. It will be made so that the admin will select the forums that they want it enabled on and it will then display that on all the posts in that category. It may be a while before its don’t for a few reasons. First IPB 3.0 hasn’t been released yet so obviously I can’t start. Second I will have to learn the ins and outs of the new plugin system. Then I just have to code it. I also have a few plans along the same lines as this but used a little differently but Its very similar to what I’ve already described.

I am really excited for IPB 3.0 because of all the new stuff that will be introduced to it. I can’t wait to get my hands on it and start playing around.

I’ve made a few new modules for The Broken Framework that may be released with it.

Crawler
I have programed a crawler that allows you to crawl sites for its links, images, basic text, title and the metas. You are able to request the information and then do with it what you please. You can write it to a file or add it to a database. Also you can crawl a number of sites at once.

New MySQL Query Builder
I am currently in the process of building a new MySQL query builder. It uses arrays and keywords to set everything up for you and then runs the query. It will also come with a log file that you can enable in the setup so that if there is an error it won’t display it to the public but will add it to the error log file. It is easy to enable and disable you just have to use the setup function that looks like this:

$broken__db->setup(true);
(More setup options available.)

You use that in one of your files that will be included on all your pages so that it applies to all $broken__db functions.